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Ach, was soll ich Sünder machen?, BWV770

Introduction

The text of BWV770 concerns the awakening of a sinner’s guilty conscience, and the Christian hope of trusting in Jesus Christ for salvation. It is given in ten parts (‘Partitas’), the first is the chorale. Partita I, the chorale, projects real gravitas through its texture and rhythmic animation. Partita II is set in a harpsichord texture, with a walking bass and a simple ornamented right hand. Partita III develops this with right-hand semiquavers, in the style of a violin obligato. Partita IV changes the texture to that of broken chords, with striking turns of harmony and melody and the chorale soaring over the top. Partita V features running semiquavers in the left hand below the chorale, and Partita VI a more virtuosic violinistic right hand, with bigger leaps and broken chords. Partita VII is marked by a change of metre, before striking right-hand figurations in demisemiquavers in Partita VIII. The final two partitas are longer and weightier. Partita IX is in a triple-time, with charming echo effects, and Partita X an ‘Allegro’, also with echo effects that perhaps reference the French Dialogue tradition, as well as speed and metre changes, and some challenging shifts of register on the keyboards.

Recordings

The so-called 'Neumeister' chorales—an expansive collection of preludes, thirty-eight of which have now been confidently ascribed to Bach—were discovered only in the 1980s. Youthful experimentations perhaps, these masterclasses in concision here f ...» More

'Let me say without hesitation that Herrick’s performances are models of clarity, accuracy, precision and musicality … this is a complete Bach th ...'Herrick is one of the few organists who does justice to these difficult, elusive pieces … What a singular joy to hear the organ played with such ...» More

Details

Ach, was soll ich Sünder machen? BWV770 represents an advance on 766 and 767, but also belongs to a date before Bach’s absorption of a number of disparate stylistic influences had been synthesised into the seamless fabric and universality of his mature idiom. Partita I, the introductory exposition of the chorale melody in straightforward but attractively rich harmony, is cast in a smoothly executed but still inconsistently-textured chordal style which points to Italian harpsichord writing, or rather those facets of it as transmitted in a number of chorale partitas from the last years of the seventeenth century within Bach’s early field of knowledge, by as important a figure as Pachelbel, among others. Similarly, Partita II, with the chorale treated as a decorated aria over continuo bass, and Partitas III, V and VI, point to the Italian harpsichord idiom of such as Domenico Zipoli in their clear harmonic direction and mellifluous passagework. A second group, Partitas IV, VII and IX, mirror French practice, the first two in style brisée (or fragmented style) idiomatic again to the harpsichord, but used also in German organ music of this early period in Bach’s career, the latter a sarabande but realised in the elegant partwriting of many a French organ verset. Bach’s native German idiom is first glimpsed in the consistent, almost obsessive, development of two contrasting rhythmic patterns in Partita VIII, and fully revealed in the final, extended, Partita X. Here, the jagged energy of the texture, the changes of speed and metre, the whole projected with infectious rhetoric, point to the stylus phantasticus of Buxtehude.